The Big Adsventure

The AdSense team has launched a new service: AdSense Video Units. With this new service you can place a Video Unit on your website and Google will figure out which videos would be best to show to your visitors. This is done by checking the content of your website, much like AdSense finds the right ads to show on your site based on its content. The Video Unit has targeted ads incorporated in the player.

It looks like the Video Units are only available to US publishers at this time, so I can’t try them out and give you a review. You can find out more about the new AdSense Video Units at:

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2007/10/introducing-video-units.html

Today I heard about a new ad project which lets you display ads from various ad networks on your website. Based on your content, type of site and demographics of your visitors, the best performing ads will be selected to be displayed on your site. The service is not available yet, but looking at the 4 minute demo video on the Rubicon Project website, I think this is a very interesting way to manage your ad space.

Looking at the team behind the Rubicon Project plus the $6 million in funding that they have secured, this has to be a winner!

It has only been a few months ago that I was struggling to reach the $100 mark in a single month. Since then my AdSense income has been growing quite fast and yesterday I’ve had my first $100 day!

Wow, it’s been nearly 2 months since I posted anything here. Time does fly when you are having fun, especially when you are making money while you are having fun.

Last years goal was to make $100 a month from AdSense by the end of the year. I already stated that I was not sure I would make it and I was right. My December earnings in AdSense was just a little short of $90 and if I add the income of other ad programs I am using the grand total for December added up to $99.97 You can’t get much closer than that, without actually making it to your target!

It was time to set a new target for this year, but what should the new target be? $200, $400, $500? I thought the $500 a month target should be achievable by the end of this year, but I was pleasantly surprised when checking my AdSense stats for January: the total for the first month of this year was a little over $500! My hard work during the low traffic days during Christmas are paying off! Another milestone was reached in January: I have passed the grand total of $1000 in total online income.

Tim Nash has been doing SEO work for a while now, but never bothered to SEO his own name, until now that is. Tim has just launched The Tim Nash experiment to try to get his site ranked at the top of the search engines when searching for “Tim Nash” if all goes as planned, you will soon find Tim Nash the IT Consultant before Tim Nash the painter. Good luck there Tim!

I was planning on reviewing the year after it had ended, but I just noticed the ProBlogger Group Writing Project thanks to Tim Nash (ventureskills at webdigity) So why not do a quick review of the year now and get a link from ProBlogger…

My AdSense income is probably in the millions in some odd currency just not in US$… My goal for this year was to get my AdSense income up to $100 a month and it looks like I am getting very close. This months total is at $75 so far and the month is not over yet. I’m not too sure if I will make it, since the Christmas holidays are just around the corner, I think my income will be lower over the next 2 weeks. Still I’m very satisfied on the results I got this year.

I have started quite a few new sites this year and should focus on making those grow bigger and create more income from them. I have witnessed the power of mailing lists first hand and will add them to several of my new sites. With people subscribing to your mailing list you can remind them on coming back to your site by sending them an occasional update report. Just be sure not to spam your subscribers or they will be gone before you know it!

Ever had a look at Google Answers? Many people have never heard of it, even though it has been running for a little over 4 years. The idea was to let people ask questions and have them answered by the answer crew. To get high quality answers the answer crew gets paid for answering questions. The money to pay them comes from the people asking the questions.

I think the big problem here is that people don’t want to pay to get a question answered when they can get free answers on forums… Another problem must have been the promotion of the service (or lack thereof) after 4 years most people have never even heard of Google Answers. But that is changing now, being one of the first Google services to be shut down, because it just didn’t work out as planned, you will see a lot on this subject all over the web over the next few days. Very soon everybody will know about Google Answers.

Maybe the shutting down of the service is to get the word out so they can do a re-launch soon. If they do, they should get a new source of funding to pay the answer crew, first thing to pop into mind would be ads…

While checking for backlinks to the 43Ads website today I noticed a mention of the site in Chris’ SEO blog. It turns out that the site has been awarded the ‘site of the month’ award for October. This monthly award is given to a website listed in the 100 lists directory In order to be eligible for the award, one main point is that the site should pass the W3C validation and use a valid CSS file. With this being my first site designed with CSS, I’m extra proud of the award!

The big number in web2.0 seems to be 43. There are a lot of sites with lists that contain 43 items. There is 43 Blogs, 43 things to do in this
life, 43 people you want to meet and even a blog about nothing
but 43.

Today a brand new site has been launched: 43Ads This new link selling website has a front page with, you’ve guessed it: 43 links. Anyone who has a little bit of cash to spend can get a link on the site and you will stay on there until other people, with more cash to spare, have pushed you off. But being pushed off of the page is not a loss, because you get your money back plus a little profit on top of that!

Rob Benwell has written an e-book on how to make money using blogs. His method does not require posting a lot to get enough visitors to the blog itself, but rather using several blogs to drive traffic to an affiliate site. Robs book, Blogging to the Bank is full of interesting thoughts on how to drive traffic to a website using blogs.

It all sounds very logical and running a blog directory myself, I notice a lot of submissions to the directory of these exact type of blogs lately. I don’t want these type of blogs in my directory and only approve the ones that are real blogs, but there are tons of directories that will accept these sites and let you build traffic to them.